‘Aurora’ on Netflix’s Tragic Ending Explained

Netflix has been going all in on horror films recently, as proven by Aurora, a foreign thriller written and directed by Yam Larana that is now streaming. The film was originally released in 2018 in the Philippines, after premiering at the Metro Manila festival in December. Netflix bought the film earlier this month and debuted it on April 25.

The Aurora cast stars Anne Curtis, a Filipino-Australian former child star who has become something of a sensation in the Phillippines as an actor, model, TV host and pop star. This is the third film starring Curtis to hit Netflix, the others being BuyBust and No Other Woman. Aurora will undoubtedly be of interest to fans of Curtis and horror alike, but films of this genre can be a tad confusing, sometimes. Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s what happens in Aurora, from beginning to end. Spoilers ahead, obviously!

What is the plot of Aurora?

Curtis plays Leana, a young woman who’s made a life for herself and her younger sister Rita (Phoebe Villamor) running a hotel on a small island. When a ship named The Aurora crashes near their home, Leana makes a deal with the families of the missing passengers to find their bodies. She and her sister search for the corpses of the shipwreck that will inevitably wash ashore, hoping to collect the bounty. With the help of a fisherman named Eddie (Allan Paule) and a friend (Marco Gumabao), the characters get sucked into a journey of questionable ethics. But soon enough, the ghosts of the dead come searching for them, rather than the other way around. Oh yeah. Now we’re getting to the good part.

How does Aurora end?

After some seriously creepy ghost stuff goes down—ghosts communicating with a little girl, corpses peering out the window of the boat, etc—we learn that there was a dead body of a really tall dude on the Aurora long before the ship crashed. When weird stuff started happening, like temperatures dropping dangerously low, the passengers blamed it on the tall dead man. Fear spread and people started losing it. As it turns out, the crash was no accident—the captain purposefully steered the ship into a rock.

As the water began to fill up the ship, the desperate passengers could only see a dim light of possible salvation in the distance—Leana’s seaside inn. Those who didn’t drown right away tried to swim toward it, but the journey was longer than expected, and most didn’t make it. Now their spirits are still trying to get to the hotel, unfortunately for Leana and her sister.

The sisters end up reliving the crash from the passengers’ point of view when they are shown the last living moments of the ghosts that have been haunting them. It’s pretty gruesome—some are even burned alive. At one point, the ghosts of all the missing people—at least 80 of them according to Rita’s count—descend on the sisters.

After they almost drown while reliving the crash, Leana and Rita wash up on shore, alive. So no one dies! Well, except for all those people in the original crash. Then, magically, the Aurora wreckage disappears.

Leana gains a new understanding of the horrors endured by the dead on the ship. She understands that the ship was illegally overcrowded for the sake of making more money and that many more people died than were listed in the official manifest. She accuses the coast guard of being in on it—that’s why they didn’t want her to look at the wreckage too closely. At the very end, Leana catches a glimpse of that tall dead man on the beach. She tells him to go home, and he walks back into the ocean.

What happened to the ship in Aurora?

We are honestly not sure! Apparently, the wreckage magically disappeared now that Leana has exposed the true nature of the tragedy. Hopefully, those ghosts can rest in peace.

Will there be an Aurora sequel?

We don’t know! But the ending certainly leaves room for one—apparently that tall dead dude is still hanging around. And who knows what really happened to the boat. If the film does well on Netflix, we wouldn’t count a sequel out.

Stream Aurora on Netflix